Time to finish up the arch-types of my primary mobs. I present a Gyrobot, because I am totally running out of ideas (it’s literally a ball with a head): I guess it’s a variation of movement — a “gyroscopic” ball
Guard clauses are not just for APIs
I love guard clauses and conditions. Simply put, a “guard” in programming is something that checks that inputs are as expected. If they are not, the code either fails or defaults to some predefined result. I want to argue that
MicroRogue DevDiary #111 – Gameplay tweaks
While thinking of the mob types to add and make, I’ve been playing the game a lot (more than the usual testing) and there’s a bunch of bigger things that have come up that need fixing. In fact, way more
MicroRogue DevDiary #110 – More enemy types
Time to add more semi-final mobs. First of all, Shieldbot: This is just a hard-to-kill slow mob with a shield mechanic. All these “new” sprites are temporary (basically a quick mash-up of existing ones), but they do roughly approximate what
MicroRogue DevDiary #109 – New enemy types
Now the big thing with enemy mobs is what their actual gameplay is. I need to add a bunch more arch-types and decide on “arch-mechanics”, so to speak — something unique to each mob. This is still partly “placeholders”, but
MicroRogue DevDiary #108 – Enemy placeholders
Next big placeholder-making and asset-organizing and sprite-planning task is the enemies — enemy mobs and all their stuff. Again, like tiles, this started as a fix-up (although I already expected it to be more than tiles) and quickly grew to
MicroRogue DevDiary #107 – Tile pallete
I got really excited about doing palette-based sprite rendering. I’ve never done this before and it sounded like a fun challenge — not too complex, not too time-consuming, but also not something I know exactly how to do. So I
MicroRogue DevDiary #106 – Tile and theme placeholders
It’s time to start filling out the game with placeholder content — all the tiles, mobs, weapons, effects. etc. Anything that is going to be an item (at least, the least amount) needs to have a placeholder. That way I
MicroRogue DevDiary #105 – Never-ending fixes
Time for another intermission of minor fixes — bugs, tweaks, missing small features, and other things classified as “tedious”. So I have holes in walls: Technically, these happen because some doors are more narrow than other doors and the more
MicroRogue DevDiary #104 – Gear stat feedback
Now that I made a bunch gear logic changes and hopefully settled on how gear provides gameplay values, I need to show feedback to the player. First of all, the player can now have no armor or shields, but my
MicroRogue DevDiary #103 – Gear stat revisit
I still have a bunch of work to do with the gear items. One of them (utility) doesn’t even do anything. Armor is sort of incomplete. The booster is the most complete one simply because it’s the last feature that
MicroRogue DevDiary #102 – Player charge continued
There are a bunch of things I need to add to my charge implementation. It kind of sounds like a simple feature. But the thing with these “oh, it’s just player moving faster for a bit” is all the extra
MicroRogue DevDiary #101 – Player charge
I planed to do player charging from very early on, but I guess it takes 100 posts for me to actually get to it. This is the kind of feature that should be added at the earliest opportunity for it
MicroRogue DevDiary #100 – Player info panel
Blog post #100! Will it be special? No. (And I totally didn’t make this exact joke in last post.) So I previously have removed/suspended all my UI-heavy features — upgrades, unlockable and changeable loadout, goals. Of the four player information
MicroRogue DevDiary #99 – Many more fixes
I have a lot, and I mean a lot, of small issues to fix. Most are not even worth going into. But these things take days to fix, so I’ll make a quick mention of the biggest ones to keep
MicroRogue DevDiary #98 – HUD fix-up
My HUD has slowly become a mess. This seems to a recurring theme with my features — they slowly degrade as time goes on. And, yes, it’s my fault for adding and changing things. It’s probably also my fault for
MicroRogue DevDiary #97 – Damage numbers
I thought about doing damage numbers for a while now — floating damage amount indicators showing the amount of damage enemies receive from various sources. In the end, I decided to do these now — to show player weapon upgrade
MicroRogue DevDiary #96 – Level-scaling values
So it’s time for me to do some balancing. Or, I guess, some preliminary work to enable balancing. By balancing I mean primarily player weapon damage, health and enemy health and weapon damage, as well as any stats gear provides.
MicroRogue DevDiary #95 – Level themes
I need to (re)add themes to the game. I used to have a “theme” concept, but it quickly turned into just “level definition”. The problem was that I was trying to customize too much, expecting to tweak everything, rather than
MicroRogue DevDiary #94 – Barrel props
My rooms are currently devoid of any interactable environment. Sure, there are mobs, but that’s no enough. There is an occasional chest, but they are far and few, so they can’t fill out rooms. I am still to adjust exact